For many thousands of years, humans have inscribed their presence on the landscape. They drew or pecked images of the fanciful, representational, or sacred on the walls of caves, rock shelters, rock faces, and boulders, as well as on structures, both monumental and quotidian. While the advent of written languages never replaced these efforts, their appearance added a new dimension to what could be represented. The written word offered the humble believer or a secular or religious elite a means by which to define a place or create a durable presence. Archaeologists have made the discovery and analysis of rock art and inscriptions of all kinds a disciplinary priority, despite the all-too-real difficulty of their interpretation.
From 1995 to 2013, John Bellezza criss-crossed the arid, high-elevation steppe – the Changtang – of Upper Tibet, the northernmost reaches of the Tibet Autonomous Region. He recorded structures, tombs, stone alignments, rock art, and, as reported in this volume, drawings on the rock of stepped structures and inscriptions. He is one of the few scholars of the ancient past who have invested significant time and effort in this vast region. He has embedded his field research into a context of fluent written and spoken Tibetan and deep familiarity with Tibetan Buddhist (and non-Buddhist) myth, ritual, and history. This unique combination of skills allows him to provide nuanced descriptions, as well as rich interpretations of his findings.
Following a brief introduction to the research and a general outline of his field methods, the book is divided into two parts, each containing five chapters: Part 1 deals with images of the stepped structures of Upper Tibet, while Part 2 describes the early rock inscriptions. Stepped structures are common elsewhere on the plateau, and in modern Tibetan Buddhism they are known as chortens (Tibetan: mchod rten). They may be small and simple and serve as a focus of ritual activity for a household or village, or they can be far larger and grandiose, functioning as reliquaries of important religious figures or as reminders of the presence of the Buddha near or within monastic complexes. Based on variation in shape, number of steps, and embellishments, Bellezza has created a typology of these chortens that is primarily descriptive and, unfortunately, of limited chronological resolution. Although stepped structures are represented in other media, such as small metal talismans or even as a motif on a gold mask from a cemetery in far-western Tibet dated to c.2000 years ago, the very large majority of the images appear to have been created following the diffusion of Buddhism to Upper Tibet after the 7th century AD.
